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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9662141" data-attributes="member: 6690965">That's not quite what I'm getting at. I'm not sure I agree we couldn't do a choice by choice analysis, but it's not what I was driving toward.I'm purporting that an element of agency is not just influence, but discrimination. It's easier to talk about in competitive games, but I'm curious how the same element manifests in the TTRPG context here. My contention is that if a player's choice always produce the desired outcome, then they functionally haven't expressed any agency in making a choice. I presented an example earlier in this thread of a race game that has one button that accelerates a fixed distance toward the finish; that seems to meet your definition of agency, but doesn't allow the player to discriminate between different lines to that end. Ultimately, I don't think the player is expressing agency in using that option to achieve the desired outcome.Extending that analogy, I don't agency increases meaningfully if you add a second button, that also advances the player the same distance. You could make a case if the second button only advances the player half as far, they can now express agency by picking between the two buttons, but I'm inclined to put trivial optimization cases outside the bounds of real agency.Removing the competitive case, and setting anything you'd like as the goal of play, on what basis do players discriminate between different lines of play? I was proposing a test earlier, that there should exist at least one case that advances the player toward the goal more readily than another line of play, and ideally there should be more than one such unique line that both could be argued to be equally effective at getting there.I'm solidly open to an example here, I think this an aspect of agency that could be encoded in TTRPG play, but I don't understand the systems nor fundamentally the goal of play being proposed here well enough to see how.</blockquote>

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